At present, spreadsheet applications are widely used in many fields. A common application is for an enterprise to generate periodically financial reports, submitting spreadsheet reports with similar or same templates monthly, weekly, or even daily. An accountant also needs to establish salary reports based on the same template every month.
Especially for small or medium-sized enterprises, because of limitations in system resources, spreadsheet applications are commonly used in place of relational databases, which are more powerful but impose high requirements on system resources, to store and manage data. Relational databases, although more powerful, are more expensive, and have very high development and maintenance costs, therefore small and medium-sized enterprises would sometimes use spreadsheet software to store and maintain data. For example, in a warehouse management scenario, if a conventional spreadsheet application is used, the warehouse keeper needs to generate inventory tables periodically to be queried. This has at least two problems. First, the time granularity for query can be limited. The inventory information changes occurring between two time points designated for storing the information could not be queried. Second, the warehouse keeper often has to maintain multiple spreadsheet files to ensure that the inventory information in a past period could be queried. Not only warehouse keepers need to store data into spreadsheets periodically or non-periodically, but also researchers may need to generate the tables of each experiment. Accountants may also need to record the salaries of the employees periodically. Teachers may also need to store the students' scores after each exam, etc.
At present, if a user is to use a conventional spreadsheet application, a common approach is to generate a template, copy/paste areas/sheets in a spreadsheet file, etc. Then the user can submit conventional reports based on the template. Querying/aggregating these reports can be a difficult job because data of different periods are often stored separately, although they may relate to the same thing. Such queries may occur frequently.
In a conventional spreadsheet application, valid changes to data in the spreadsheet are often discarded, and only the current value of each item is recorded in the spreadsheet file. Thus, some useful operations may not be performed on the dataset conveniently.
There is a need for a change oriented spreadsheet application, wherein when a spreadsheet file is updated, not only the original content, but also the updated content and the time information related to the update are recorded in the same spreadsheet file, so that the user can obtain historical data using different query conditions, and view the historical data in various ways, such as in snapshots, charts, etc. Further, there is also a need for a data organization method for a change oriented spreadsheet application, which can guarantee valid updates insertion operations, as well as valid updates to query operations, as well as a need for query and presentation methods based on the data organization method. In addition, there is also a need for a data management method for a change oriented spreadsheet application that provides for archiving, restoring, deleting, and refining valid updates.
According what is needed is a method and system to over come the problems encountered in the prior art.